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The silent majority in software

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The silent majority in software

#281

Post by jonshariat »

silisili wrote: post #6

> Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion, Can't speak for Reddit, but that's not at all the case here. For example, I often speak of my hatred of microservices here. I'll get some upvotes and agreement, some people telling me it's a dumb opinion, and some people telling me we're doing it wrong and explain their right way. Believe it or not, I learn a lot…

I think your experience actually proves the point and touches on why many dangerous and crazy POV have also been getting so much air time in the news.

Let's say you have 2 opposing POV: A or B

"A" has a silent majority so only 5 of the 5,000 people post a comment about A being the right POV.

"B" is a passionate minority so 5 of the 50 people post a comment about B being the right POV.

To the viewer, it looks like a balanced discussion and a topic open to much debate, both sides have equal voice but in reality "A" is by far the most accepted position.

Re: The silent majority in software

#282

Post by jonshariat »

jonshariat wrote: post #281
silisili wrote: post #6

> Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion, Can't speak for Reddit, but that's not at all the case here. For example, I often speak of my hatred of microservices here. I'll get some upvotes and agreement, some people telling me it's a dumb opinion, and some people telling me we're doing it wrong and explain their right way. Believe it or not, I learn a lot…

I think your experience actually proves the point and touches on why many dangerous and crazy POV have also been getting so much air time in the news. Let's say you have 2 opposing POV: A or B "A" has a silent majority so only 5 of the 5,000 people post a comment about A being the right POV. "B" is a passionate minority so 5 of the 50 people post a comment about B being the right POV. To the viewer, it looks like a b…

It also shows up in bad news writing and science writing.

For example you have 99% of scientist agreeing about global warming.

You have 1% who disagree.

So they write that "Some scientist disagree" and it sounds like its up for debate or maybe a significant portion know something the others don't.

In the pursuit of a "Balanced" POV they tip the scales vs just reporting where the scales are at accurately.

Re: The silent majority in software

#283

Post by vbezhenar »

marcosdumay wrote: post #223
jollybean wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally don't need to use Oracle though ...

How else can you spend thousands of dollars an year to get an horrible programmer experience at the expense of performance and data safety? Plenty of people are stuck with Oracle, but starting with it nowadays is something else.

Oracle provides multimaster replication.

Re: The silent majority in software

#284

Post by Tainnor »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #114
eternityforest wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think microservices are silent majority. They seem like more of a blogger architect who likes to tinker with stuff thing. I would expect the true silent majority just uses monoliths. If it works and doesn't make people complain every day when they work on it, why use a microservice? That's more work. Everyone likes to think of microservices as a modern high tech thing, but to me it seems like old fashioned un…

I've joined a company with a silent majority monolith, and joined at the inflection point where they realise their monolith is strangling them... If your dev guide in the wiki says "to run unit tests, use docker-compose exec monolith test some.package.test_class", you're in danger. This company needs to start breaking the monolith down into, well maybe not microservices, but at least smaller monoliths, if they want t…

No, you just need a sane test architecture. I've worked on monoliths, and none of them required docker compose for unit tests.

Now, you may need some extra infrastructure for integration tests, depending on how you architect them, but that's also not a requirement. You could also use mock services, test containers, ... - essentially there's enough ways to make this sane.

It's annoying that people take badly written monoliths as an excuse to proceed to write badly written microservices.

Re: The silent majority in software

#285

Post by snovv_crash »

remram wrote: post #266
snovv_crash wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a deployment and dependencies issue, not a monolith issue. The microservices equivalent needs Kubernetes to run your tests.

Usually not for unit tests.

Well you can do the same with a monolith too right, just pull some random code out of the codebase and compile it without anything else, plus the tests for it. It gives the same guarantees as the microservices unit tests.

Re: The silent majority in software

#286

Post by snovv_crash »

kaashif wrote: post #256
treis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what is wrong with the test command?

I don't know what _they_ think is wrong with it, but if you need docker-compose to run unit tests, they're not unit tests. Unit tests really shouldn't have external dependencies of the kind docker-compose helps to provide. That's more of a terminology point IMO, and probably not what they were talking about.

I'm guessing it is something like "works with version X of dependency Y which is only available on Linux distro Z" and distro Z is only available with an ancient kernel which makes it a pain to run on modern laptops so everyone just develops in Docker.

Re: The silent majority in software

#287

Post by [deleted] »

detaro wrote: post #87
gernb wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're supposed to downvote things you disagree with on HN. Here's Dang pointing to PG saying that downvoting for disagreeing is what you're supposed to do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

"It's ok to do that" != "you are supposed to do that", and behavior of people varies accordingly.

[deleted]

Re: The silent majority in software

#288

Post by nvarsj »

t_mann wrote: post #140
nvarsj wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

140k is possible, it's probably an outlier though for a perm role. I worked at a SF based start up and that is around the salary they paid EMEA principal engineers. FAANG will pay more than that for a senior engineer (around 200k). As a contractor you can also hit this number pretty easily (it's around 600/day).

The GP said 140k was at or above the average, while the data suggests that it's an extreme outlier. But tbh I struggle to believe it even for senior roles at a SV start-up. Do you know what the reasoning was for paying so far above the market? Freelancing is a different story.

I think you're right, this was in the UK (pre-brexit) so 140 was competitive with similar contracting roles. Elsewhere it is probably a lot lower.

Re: The silent majority in software

#289

Post by vbezhenar »

wnolens wrote: post #212
danielvaughn wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who really appreciates strong typing, I will die on this hill - I hate Typescript. Introducing a transpiled typing system on top of a dynamically typed language is a recipe for all sorts of insane complexity, which is what I experience whenever I try to use TS. If you consider all the time and effort it took to introduce types for every NPM project out there, all the development of the language itself, the…

Did a personal web project and chose TypeScript to see what the rage was about. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to design types. At some points I couldn't figure it out, or I ran into some limitation of the language to express what I need. So my code has a bunch of exclamation points everywhere to assert that a null ain't coming. It feels dirty. Just too hard to use for me.

What's so hard about designing types? I'm Java developer and when I need to use TS, I just write Java with it. Works fine. The only times I encounter weird types is when for some reason I need to read type definitions for some weird JS library. But that's relatively rare.

Re: The silent majority in software

#290

Post by innocentoldguy »

ksec wrote: post #218

>While browsing HackerNews, I sometimes get the feeling that every developer out there is working for FAANG Bubbles on HN; Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tech. Non-FANNG are getting $150K anyway. Ruby may be dead, but PHP is even more dead. Java may rule the enterprise, but you should not mention Java. No one uses Oracle or MySQL, why would you want that? Postgres is the…

Almost dead on. You just forgot to mention the unwritten rule of not criticizing all the “Blah blah blah in Go” posts.
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